New indoor soccer field: 'It's been a dream of ours'

New indoor soccer field: 'It's been a dream of ours'

This is a dream come true for people like Matt Boyd and Shane Geraghty. The pair, who are both on the board for Brockville Soccer Club Inc. (BSCI), grew up playing soccer in the area and are all too familiar with being forced to put away their cleats by the time September comes around.

This is a dream come true for people like Matt Boyd and Shane Geraghty.

The pair, who are both on the board for Brockville Soccer Club Inc. (BSCI), grew up playing soccer in the area and are all too familiar with being forced to put away their cleats by the time September comes around.

Now Boyd and Geraghty, along with the BSCI board of directors, are part of a group leading the charge that is seeing artificial turf put inside Stingers, located in the Brockville Shopping Centre on Stewart Boulevard.

The indoor pitch is going to be accessible year-round and available on snow days and weekends when schools are closed, said Boyd.

The length of the turf all rolled out is just under 100-feet in length and about 45-feet wide.

“It’s longer than a gym and little bit more narrow,” said Boyd, BSCI president, adding there are nets permanently setup on the field. “It’s the real experience. It’s not playing in a gym.”

The plan was always to have indoor soccer at Stingers with a kids night on Oct. 18. The event was setup before the incoming turf was made official and originally the young players were going to play on Stingers’regular floor, which is like a gym floor.

“The Brockville area has always wanted artificial turf,” said Geraghty, BSCI’s director of coaching and player development. “It’s been a dream of ours.”

The plan to move turf into Stingers came together quickly.

The idea was floated by Boyd in mid-September to Stingers owner Andrew Walford-Davis. About 48 hours later, Boyd let Walford-Davis know he bought some turf to put down in his facility, which was once an old Zellers.

Volunteers, which included the Brockville Tikis, took a little less than a week to roll out the turf and were cleaning it. Workers went into Stingers Thursday to seam the turf rolls together and further repair and clean it. Lines are expected to be painted on next week.

Boyd made calls to people in the Toronto area who might know of old domes shutting down in his hunt for turf being sold. He was put in touch with someone from New Market who had 6,000 square-feet of turf available.

Boyd went ahead and bought some of that turf before taking the initiative to the BSCI board of directors because he knew, “we have good people on the board that were going to support the decision anyway.”

“The reality is the city needs it and it’s going to be profitable in the end for whoever runs it, so I was happy just making the decision myself,” added Boyd.

Boyd apparently knows his board pretty well. They all agreed buying the turf was a good idea and, “A lot of us couldn’t sleep the night he told us, including myself,” said Geraghty.

BSCI was ready to buy the turf, but they weren’t exactly prepped to move it.

Boyd and Danny Powers, BSCI director of canteen and special events, made the 350-plus-kilometre trip to New Market in a 26-foot U-Haul to pick up the turf. When the Brockville pair got there they put a six-foot wide half roll of turf into the truck and then couldn’t move the rest with each roll weighing about 3,500 pounds. Boyd and Powers drove back to Brockville with just half a roll and it took 12 people to get it out of the truck.

BSCI paid a freight company to ship the rest of the turf.

Boyd and Geraghty grabbed a soccer ball and started kicking it around as soon as some of those first rolls were out.

While the indoor field at Stingers came together quickly, in actuality something similar to this plan has been a longtime coming. Boyd estimated BSCI has talked about wanting an indoor facility for about 10 to 15 years.

BSCI board members are hoping this is a stepping stone to something bigger down the road.

“We see this as a five-to-10-year plan where this is usable and everybody is happy, but we want a dome,” said Boyd. “This city is screaming for a multi-sports facility and unfortunately not always landing on ears that are receptive to it or have the ability to do anything about it. We’re hoping that’s changing and we’re hoping that we can be the spark to show them that there is potential here.”

Boyd said BSCI has reduced its operating expenses by 40 per cent in the last two years, as well as reduced membership expenses and increased its membership base.

“And we still have the foresight to take on investments like this that are not breaking the bank by any means, but it’s a substantial portion of our budget going into this and not one person (on the board) hesitated to do it because they knew it was good for the city,” said Boyd.

“You can’t hesitate,” interrupted Geraghty. “I’ve been in Brockville my whole life and we’ve been crying for a dome and all we ever hear about is the hockey twin pads.”

Both Boyd and Geraghty expect BSCI membership to grow even more because of the Stingers project now that they can offer more programs.

A key area BSCI has struggled in, said Boyd, is player development with such limited time on the field throughout the year. He hopes the indoor facility will help those troubles.

Up until now the soccer season has only been three months long, said Geraghty. The turf, obviously, extends that time frame to year-round.

“If you give the kids more reason to be serious in the sport they’ll come out in droves because, ‘Hey, I can go somewhere.’For soccer in Brockville you can never have those dreams of being a Division 1 athlete in soccer,” said Geraghty. “With an indoor turf this gives the kids the dream that they can come practice every single day in the summer time.”

Brody, 10, plays with a soccer ball while people behind him work to get the rest of the turf rolled out and cleaned before the workers come in to seam the rolls together at Stingers. (Jonathon Brodie/The Recorder and Times)

The exact financial and pricing details haven’t been finalized between BSCI and Stingers with how quickly things came together, but Boyd said it’s a “win-win” for both sides and they “trust each other.” Both sides covered some of the costs to get the turf, added Boyd.

“(Stingers) has kind of taken a mind of its own, but a lot of it is thinking outside the box,” said Walford-Davis. “We have this space so lets use it to our advantage.

It’s not always about the dollar aspect. It’s about getting everybody together, thinking about the ideas, and making it happen.”

Stingers was originally supposed to be a paintball facility when it opened in 2015 with the potential of adding batting cages and laser tag to the plans. Now Stingers is looking to revamp its name by adding “sports rec centre” to its title, said Walford-Davis.

Currently filling the giant building is paintball, batting cages and pitching mounds, basketball and volleyball courts, a track-and-field facility in the back complete with a jumping pit where the Legion trains, a Crossfit club, and pool and ping-pong tables. Two squash courts are looking to be added in the near future.

According to Boyd, other sports clubs and leagues have reached out to Stingers since learning the news of the indoor turf and they’re trying to find out the availability of getting on the field.

“All our teenage life we were wishing we had a dome and when the opportunity came, how could you possibly say no to that?,” said Geraghty before Boyd cut him off and added, “And some of us when it happened became teenagers again.”